McChrystal gets a new gig – Notes from the Petraeus interview – Shrinkage for the Marines – L-M's Buff Plane

By Jen DiMascio and Gordon Lubold

08/16/10 05:35 AM EDT

POLITICO’s Morning Defense By Gordon Lubold and Jen DiMascio

EXCLUSIVE – Yale University is expected to announce this week that Stan McChrystal has a new gig – as a lecturer in New Haven. He’ll turn in his cammies and combat boots for a pipe and patches after being appointed a senior fellow at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, where he’ll teach graduate students a course on leadership, Morning Defense has learned.

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A REINCARNATION FOR McCHRYSTAL – White House officials have had to be curious where a potentially disgruntled McChrystal would hang his political hat, if he hung it at all. But as he contemplated his afterlife as a civilian, weighing lucrative or intriguing opportunities at large corporations, NGOs and even wounded warrior groups, McChrystal opted to go non-partisan: to an institution known for graduating Bushes and Clintons. Despite his reputation as a snake-eating terrorist killer, the West Pointer has for now chosen the clubby, dark-paneled world of academia, where he has already done stints at Harvard and the Council on Foreign Relations, and is said to enjoy the rhetorical jousting and intellectual candor of an academic environment. And also where it’s harder to get into hot water for speaking your mind.

PETRAEUS DIDN’T MAKE NEWS – But he did begin to change the conversation on Afghanistan some in his first interview since arriving there, with David Gregory of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” experts told Morning Defense. News junkies were likely disappointed that Petraeus didn’t say anything intriguing or outrageous. Instead, he stuck to the new script: Watch this space.

DID IT BUY HIM SOME TIME? – Tony Cordesman: “This is a remarkably successful general who has begun a campaign,” Cordesman told Morning Defense. “I think that Gen. Petraeus is taking is a leadership role and one that is vital in communicating what CAN happen. You can count on a series of reports, speeches and a steady effort to make this war more transparent and understandable to the American people and to Congress and to our allies, and at the same time build up trust in Afghanistan-Pakistan.”

OVERNIGHT – North Korea said it would “deal a merciless counterblow” to South Korea due to the U.S.-South Korean naval exercises that began today with 36,000 American troops and 56,000 South Korean troops. http://yhoo.it/a77und

Good Monday morning. It’s 0-Dark-30 and time for another edition of Morning Defense.

GATES SAYS THE MC WILL SHRINK – He has ordered up a “force structure review” of the Marine Corps that he and others have discussed in recent weeks. At the George P. Shultz (not Schultz) lecture he gave Thursday in San Francisco, Gates said the review will determine what an “expeditionary-force-in-readiness” should look like in the 21st century. Earlier that day, Gates told sailors aboard the USS Higgins docked in San Diego that “after the surge in Afghanistan ends, the personnel will probably reduce some,” and, “They think they have gotten too big.”

YOU HEARD IT HERE – While it is still clearly under review, sources confirm to Morning Defense again that the Marine Corps is eyeing a force between 183,000 and 185,000. “That number is where we think we need to be and can be healthy, post-Afghanistan, so we can get to those dwell rates,” a Marine Corps official told Morning Defense. “Everything I have heard is in alignment with that.” But if the Corps shrinks, then whither programs some would like to cut but that the MC holds dear, like JSF and EFV?

The Navy is due to pick a winner this summer, but remember – that stretches into September.

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A NEW CAMPAIGN IN AFG? – Petraeus began his campaign yesterday on NBC (and in interviews he granted to the WaPo and the NYT that appear today) to turn the conversation around for the American public and a skeptical but for now begrudgingly supportive Congress. The arrival in Kabul of Petraeus (“P4” is military shorthand for Petraeus, a four-star, so P-4) had seemed to mark the beginning of a new end, a change in course from McChrystal (“M4”). But the narrative P4 is trying to create is that he is merely picking up where M4 left off and now, as almost all the surge troops arrive (98 percent will be there by the end of the month, says Gates), finally there is an opportunity to see what this strategy is capable of doing.

Petraeus, from the David Gregory interview:

On July 2011: “I don’t find that stifling.”

On what he went there to do: “I didn't come out here to carry out a graceful exit or something like that. I came out here committed to achieving our objectives and doing everything that we can to doing that.”

On winning or losing: “We're making progress, and progress is winning, if you will. But it takes the accumulation of a lot of progress, ultimately, needless to say, to win overall, and that's going to be a long-term proposition, without question.”

On why the American people are “confused, frustrated and not invested”: “I can understand it. In fact, that's why I've sought to explain that over the last 18 months or so what we have sought to do in Afghanistan is to get the inputs right for the first time.”

On running for president: “No way, no how.”

WE’LL GRANT YOU IT SOUNDED GOOD – That bit about Grant on “Meet the Press” looked as if David Gregory just happened to be asking P4 about a quote on Grant when P4 just happened to be reading a book about Grant. Wasn’t quite that fabulous. Prior to the interview, Morning Defense learned, Gregory had asked P4 what he was reading, then found the quote he later asked P4 about.

EIKENBERRY ON HIS TRUST ISSUES – Gregory asked Karl Eikenberry about the leaked cables and whether he trusted Hamid Karzai, and if he had changed his view: “David, we have a very good cooperation with the government of Afghanistan to work at the challenges we have here of helping to build a capable government. This is a hard task, and my role here as the United States ambassador, is to take forward the president's strategy here. We've got a very clear strategy, David. We've got, for the first time, we've got the proper resources. We've got an array of, I think, good programs here in working with the Afghan government and their law enforcement sector, their judicial sector, and we remain cautiously optimistic of our ability to make progress.” [Obvious note: Never mentioned Karzai.]

AFG STRAT IS “FUNDAMENTALLY SOUND” – P4 told the WaPo’s Rajiv Chandrasekaran that now that he’s had a chance to assess the strategy in Afghanistan up close and personally, he feels good about it. Chandrasekaran: “With public support for the war slipping and a White House review of the conflict due in December, Petraeus said he is pushing the forces under his command to proceed with alacrity. He remains supportive of President Obama's decision to begin withdrawing troops next July, but he said it is far too soon to determine the size of the drawdown.” http://bit.ly/aPKUuW

PETRAEUS ARGUES AGAINST A “PRECIPITIOUS WITHDRAWAL” – NYT’s Dexter Filkins also had a sit-down with Petraeus, in which he argued against a big withdrawal next year and said that now, finally, is an opportunity to show the American public what the strategy is capable of doing. “General Petraeus said that it was only in the last few weeks that the war plan had been fine-tuned and given the resources that it required. “For the first time,” he said, “we will have what we have been working to put in place for the last year and a half.” http://nyti.ms/bGB5UT

FYI – Chandrasekaran’s and Filkins’s recent Petraeus interviews were embargoed to allow David Gregory to have the first public crack at Petraeus.

SEEMS LIKE IRAQ ALL OVER AGAIN – Jim Dubik, the retired three-star who led training of Iraqi forces in 2007-2008 and is now a senior fellow at the Institute for the Study of War, said the current narrative about Afghanistan reminds him of when he was in the fight in Iraq as the head of the command training Iraqi security forces. Even as the tide was turning in Iraq, he sensed a different view during his visits to Washington: “We were wrong in throwing in the towel too early and we were too quick to declare defeat in the spring of 2007,” he told Morning Defense.

A FASTER EXIT? – LAT’s David Cloud had an 18-minute face-to-face with Gates on his trip last week. So far, Cloud has had two exclusive stories from the invu, including one today about what the accelerated pace at which Afghan troops have been trained – meeting the 134,000 goal two months earlier, as ISAF recently announced – means for the overall strategy. Gates told Cloud: "With more Afghan forces, we can be on a path to transition in more places around the country," Gates said. "The success with the [Afghan] army in particular, I think, bodes well for in fact beginning to have some transitions maybe as early as this spring, but certainly beginning in the summer." http://bit.ly/ajwxuq

TEN BILLION OVER FOUR YEARS – On Saturday, Cloud reported that Gates disclosed that the plan to reduce spending on civilian contractors could free up more than $10 billion over the next four years, and that Gates wants the savings to be spent on new ships, fighters and other weapons systems rather than on reducing the federal budget deficit. Gates: "In three years, there will be 70% as much money [for support contracts] as there is today.” Cloud reports that Gates’s goal is to reduce the number of contractor personnel from the current 39 percent of the Pentagon’s civilian workforce to 26 percent, where it was in 2000. http://bit.ly/ddmnqR

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Authors:

About The Author

Jen DiMascio is a writer who specializes in defense. Before coming to Politico, she covered Congress for Defense Daily and military policy and purchasing for Inside the Army. DiMascio has worked as a reporter for The Other Paper, a Columbus, Ohio, alternative newsweekly, and has written for The New York Times, The Village Voice and other publications.

About The Author

Gordon Lubold, a defense reporter, joined POLITICO after working for The Christian Science Monitor and, before that, Army Times newspapers. He arrived in Afghanistan after Sept. 11, 2001, as an embedded reporter and then embedded again with a Marine unit prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He has embedded or traveled with the military overseas many times since. When he’s not playing foreign correspondent, he can be found in the corridors of the Pentagon or the halls of the Hill. Gordon graduated from the College of Wooster in Ohio. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Alexandria, Va.